Page 120 of High Season
Hannah moans again as he slides his arms around her, her weight shifting from Tamara to him. As if she knows, Tamara thinks. As if she can tell. As she lets her brother lift Hannah, Tamara reaches out, squeezes Hannah’s limp hand.
I promise,she tries to convey to her,I’m not going to let him hurt you.
Hannah’s eyelids flicker again. As if she understands.
FORTY-ONE
2024
“Imogen,” Josie says. “Did you bring the case file?”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Nina to get here?” Hannah asks.
Josie glances at her watch. Nina is thirty minutes late.
“Actually,” says Imogen gently. “It might be better this way. You might want to see this first, Hannah.”
She lifts her bag up on the table and pulls out a sheaf of papers. They aren’t in the hard cardboard case that Josie recognizes.
“Copies,” Imogen says, almost apologetically. “The documentary crew—they’re not letting this shit out of their sight. I managed to take photos on my phone and get them printed out when everyone was on lunch.”
She spreads them out on the table. They’re grainy, not quite what Josie had hoped for. But they’re enough. She feels, strongly now, that the truth is within these pages.
“Hannah,” Imogen says. “This might be hard for you to see.”
Photographs, blown up and in black-and-white. The quality is bad, an early aughts mobile phone camera, blurred again by Imogen’s secondhand photography. The images are difficult to make out, at first. You have to look at them for a moment, allow the pixels to recalibrate into an image.
Then, the jut of a hip bone. The fade of light skin into the dark bruise of a nipple. An eye, half-closed, an expression that Josie had initially interpreted as lust, a head tilted back as if the body it belongs to is in the throes of an orgasm.
An expression that could be desire, or could be distance. That could be someone out of their mind with passion, or simply out of their mind. Someone who is not wholly within themselves.
“It’s me,” Hannah says, blankly.
She picks one of the pictures up, holds it between her thumb and forefinger, as if it’s something contaminated.
“These are all of me.”
“After Nina came forward and the investigation became criminal, the police took the cell phones of people close to Tamara,” Imogen says quietly. “Cell phone technology was much less advanced then, so there wasn’t as much that could be recovered. They were primarily looking for messages between family members and Tamara that Tamara might have removed from her own device, and that they were unable to recover. The police obviously thought these were interesting enough to keep on file.”
“These were on Blake’s phone?”
The piece of paper that Hannah holds has begun to crease beneath her grip.
“They’d been deleted, but the police were able to access them,” Imogen says. “Evidently, Blake didn’t know his phone had a recently deleted folder. They were timestamped on the day Tamara died.”
“But… if the police had these images… I mean… nobody’s ever shown me these before.”
“I don’t think the police ever looked into who the pictures were of. In fact, I don’t think they looked into them much at all, or if Blake was ever asked about them. There’s a ton of other stuff in here that isn’t really pertinent to the case—messages between Evelyn and her party planner, texts between Blake and Barnaby van Beek.”
“When I first saw these, I assumed they were consensual,” Josie says. “That you and Blake had taken these together when you were hooking up, or even that you’d taken themforhim.”
Gently, she reaches over and takes the picture from Hannah’s hand. Lays it out on the table in front of her again.
“But Hannah,” Josie says. “These are from the night that Tamara died. And you don’t remember them being taken?”
Hannah shakes her head. She is still looking down at the pictures.
“I was drunk,” she says. “I don’t remember the night well. But… I don’t understand.”
